72 f"\ f^ , I & " ">< ) \ .. YJ ><,t "'- . L . N". ' .t1J 11 .. ....... ý ,- , .1- · J, ""'"'" _N' ... ,.,. * '%- .. ... > so f 1"" t" '" .. ... -- '"...r... ..,. $v. Ï:" ... "".. > J J _ . t, t t \. ;.. .. \ . ." }: v /.J." ./ " . . '. f'v '. ':':>>;, ,;., ^ .* . "Leave us) but don)t forget to write us.)) . me, and he continued to do so after his daughter and I broke up." We were passing through generally flat, scrabbly country, with some roll- ing hillocks and occasional stands of eucalyptus serving as windbreaks. "Anyway," Peña continued, "it turned out that there was a Tupamaro leader who happened to be named Alfredo de La Peña, and one day-this was shortly after the coup-the military apparently got hold of a document about some Tupa action with this guy's name on it. They published it, and three days later they suddenly hauled me in and began torturing me. One day, the colo- nel showed up at the torture center, yelling and screaming. He held me personally responsible for corrupting his daughter, both morally and politi- cally, and now this proved everything -he was convinced that I'd seduced his daughter so as to spy on him, and he assured me that my continuing misery would be his ongoing persona] proj- ect. " I asked Peña the colonel's name. He said he would prefer not to give it, and, . for that matter, he'd prefer it if I didn't use his name, either. I asked if he was afraid the military might be coming back. "They don't have to come back," he assured me. "They're still here, only barely behind the curtain, totally unscathed." Peña was tortured for weeks, and eventually he signed a confession- "I had to, I couldn't take it anymore"- on the basis of which he received a twenty-five-year sentence. He was re- leased only when Libertad itself was shut down. Since then he had been able to track down a copy of his confession, and it turned out that the text was word for word identical-"right down to the spelling errors" -with the docu- ment about the Tupamaro action which the military had published three days before his arrest. Peña smiled: he was not past seeing the grim humor in his tale. In fact, he had a strong, tough, and probably sav- ing sense of humor. "Everybody had his own story," he continued. "I had a friend who got married in 1972. He had a wedding reception, and then he and his bride went to a house in the country they'd rented for the night. They got there at three minutes to twelve At twelve-fifteen, there was a knock at the door, and the guy went to the window to see who was there. It was a young kid with a bunch of flowers from a florist. So he opened the door and reached out to take the flowers, and suddenly, from behind this kid, the police came barging in. They bagged both him and his bride and dragged them away. The bride was later released, but the groom was tortured until he confessed to some- thing or other, and he ended up in Libertad, like me, and was only re- leased at the end, like me. We always called him Billy the Kid-the fastest gun around-because his bride had a baby nine months after the wedding night." The countryside streamed by. "I have no idea where we're going," Peña told me. "I hope you do," he said to the driver, who did. "I mean, I was there for twelve and a half years, but I hardly ever went there-at any rate, not with- out a hood. You can see, though, what a terrible trek it was for people's fami- lies. Visitors had to be at the prison's gates by 8 A.M., and there were long lines, so visitors often had to arrive the day before and find someplace out there in the middle of nowhere to spend the night." This was going to be Peña's first time back. And then there it was, looming on the horizon. "That's it," the taxi- driver said. I don't know what I had ex- pected-maybe the wretched, crum- bling dungeon from the movie "Kiss of the Spider W oman"-but this was something altogether different. It was a sleek, white, rectangular, modern edifice. Basically, it looked like a Holi- day Inn: five floors hovering in midair above massive steel pylons (the easier to prevent escapes, I suppose), two wings spreading out from a squat central tower (the panopticon's obser- vatory). Road signs began to point the way to "RECUPERATION CENTER #2," which was what the prison was now called. We veered off the high- way for the final approach. "The fam- ilies were never allowed to drive these last two miles," Peña said. "They had to walk-old, broken parents, wives lugging infants and bundles. And then we had to walk, too, on the day of our release. Nobody was allowed to meet us at the gate. W e had to walk